The technology needed to track and guarantee music companies and artists receive every single royalty check they earn does not exist. DDEX wants to do something about it.

But DDEX (Digital Data Exchange), the not-for-profit consortium backed by the major record labels, publishers, international copyright organizations and digital-music retailers, has announced the next best thing.

It recently launched Recording Information Notification (RIN) and the Digital Sales Report Flat File Standard (DSR), two new formats offering the most simplified but efficient system possible for collecting and distributing royalties in the digital space (see chartflow below).

What is RIN? RIN is designed to capture the metadata that describes who composed a song, recorded it, in which country plus any other descriptive information (see Chart below).

Crucially, instead of guessing at which point the recording first started (as has traditionally been the case), RIN ensures that information is established from the get-go, whether in a physical recording studio or a virtual one on a website.

Although the 10-year-old DDEX oversees a host of standards to help identify rights owners of physical recordings and digital downloads, the new RIN and DSR ensure those norms for the first time also cover music available on today’s subscription-funded streaming services. These include Spotify, the world’s largest streaming music platform and its rivals Apple Music, Tidal and Deezer.